Independent presidential candidate Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr.( a.k.a. RFK Jr) on Friday dropped his bid for the United States presidency and announced support for former President Donald Trump. The 70 year-old is the scion of the nation's most storied political dynasty, the iconic Democrat Party family of Kennedys -- his late father Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, who were both assassinated in the 1960s.
Kennedy launched his campaign for the Democrat party presidential nomination in April of last year, but switched to an independent run last October.
"…I've made the heart-wrenching decision to suspend my campaign and to support President Trump" Kennedy said at a press event in Phoenix, Arizona. "This decision is agonizing for me because of the difficulties it causes me, and my children and my friends." He charged that the Democrat Party "waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself," and "ran a sham primary."
"Three causes drove me to enter this race in the first place," he said "And these are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent and now to throw my support at President Trump. The causes were free speech, war in Ukraine and the war on our children."
Democrat party elites in what political observers described as a "coup," forced President Joe Biden to drop his own bid for re-election despite wining over 14 million primary votes, and replaced him with Kamala Harris as the party's nominee.
"In an honest system, I believe I would have won the election," Kennedy argued, Friday. "I no longer believe that I have a realistic past of electoral victory in the face of this relentless, systematic censorship and media control."
Kennedy's campaign is asking swing states to remove his name from the ballot because he does not want to be a "spoiler," he said. He will remain on the ballot in states that he considers "red"(Republican) or "blue"(Democrat), he said. "If you live in a blue state, you can vote for me without harming or helping President Trump or or Vice President Harris," he said. "In red states, the same will apply."
The 70 year-old who met with Trump last month, said he tried to reach out the Democrat party nominee but, "Vice President Harris declined to meet or even to speak with me."
Kennedy described the modern Democrat Party as "the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big ag, and big money."
"The DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself," he said. "Each time that our volunteers turned in those towering boxes of signatures needed to get on the ballot, the DNC dragged us into court, state after state, attempting to erase their work and disappear with the will of the voters, which signed those petitions."
"It deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me and other candidates off the ballot, and to throw President Trump in jail," Kennedy added.
According to running Kennedy's mate Nicole Shanahan, the campaign is facing no fewer than nine lawsuits from the Democrat Party. The campaign faces uphill legal climbs with suits in Nevada, North Carolina, Delaware and New Jersey. Trump, Shanahan said, faces 6 legal battles brought on by Democrats at the same time.
And the DNC battled Kennedy and his supporters at nearly every step as he worked to place his name on the ballot in all 50 states. "What the Democrats consider common course to win elections is the kind of ‘normalcy’ that leads to famine, sickness, and civil war. The country is ready for an administration that represents unity," Shanahan said in a social media post.
Democrats consistently have attacked both Trump and Kennedy as anti-democracy candidates. That was the theme of speakers at the Democrat National Convention in Chicago this week, where Harris formally accepted his nomination to be the party's candidate in November's presidential elections. "….Trump won’t hold autocrats accountable -- because he wants to be an autocrat," the vice president said at the DNC.
The relationship between Kennedy and Trump started warming earlier this year, and the two spoke last month after the assassination attempt against Trump and met in person the following day. "In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues and those meetings," Kennedy said.
Hours after suspending his presidential campaign Friday, Kennedy joined Trump on stage in Glendale, Arizona, where they rallied a capacity crowd in the same arena where Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz held a rally earlier this month.
"We are both in this to do what's right for the country," Trump told the large crowd inside the Desert Diamond Arena with Kennedy standing beside him, adding that if he wins the presidency, he would establish an independent presidential commission on assassination attempts that would also be tasked with releasing all the remaining documents related to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy, RFK Jr.'s uncle, who was killed in 1963.
"He is a phenomenal person, a phenomenal man who loves the people of this country," Trump added of Kennedy.
Kennedy said he had more than one meeting with Trump starting last month, in which they "talked not about the things that separate us because we don't agree on everything, but on the values and the issues that bind us together. And one of the issues that he talked about was having safe food and ending the chronic disease epidemic."
He added of Trump: "Don't you want a president who's going to protect America's freedoms and who is going to protect us against totalitarianism? … Don't you want a safe environment for your children? Don't you want to know that the food that you're feeding them is not filled with chemicals that are going to give them cancer and chronic disease? And don't you want a president that's going to make America healthy again?"
Trump added that Kennedy "did well in the polls" but the two-party system made it "very tough" for his candidacy.
The Republican candidate also pitched to Kennedy's supporters. "And all who supported Bobby's campaign, I very simply ask you to join us in building this coalition," Trump said. "It's a beautiful coalition in defense of liberty and safety, prosperity and peace. It's going to be an incredible coalition, and the relationship has been so good for so long. I have no doubt it's going to work and work well, but we have to win. We have to take our country away from these people that are going to destroy our country."
Recent national polls indicated Kennedy at between 5 to 6% support.
